Sunday morning and the windows
in my house of cards look
out onto bare, stripped branches and air
so cold between buildings
that even flight is stolen from birds,
but it’s not winter,
and it’s not the city.
At the bar on Friday,
I realized partway through the night
that when I forgot to talk,
I was making the people and the music,
the spinning lights and your face
that I watched when you weren’t looking
into a poem, writing lines in my head
that I've mostly forgotten.
I remember thinking how odd
it was to be caught in a stranger’s
photograph, the camera flash
on the dance floor pinning
me forever in the picture’s background,
an accidental, incidental
extra in a reality that was not mine,
and I wonder now if I became a part
of your life even for a second, because I wanted
so badly the shine of the sky
and the orange of the koi
and the spilled cranberry juice
to not be fugitive memories to you
but part of a remembered day
made more perfect in its simplicity
because your face is already fading
in between one hit of lightning and another,
the tornadoes swarming above us
that will not funnel down to Nicollet Avenue
just because you told me so,
and the kiss that never happened
a secret thought to both of us, what
I needed the most when your daughter took my hand
as she walked between us outside the monkey house.
And in here today, the bittersweet
blurs my quiet breathing
and these unanswerable words that must fill
the distance between your house and mine,
your hands and mine, because I am not there
to give you anything else.
